We were using condoms and I was on birth control, so it was like a complete anomaly.

Maryland, United States

Jan 01, 2005

I was raised Roman Catholic and went to Catholic school until I was 13 years old. I was a very... I don't know how to approach this... I was a very good kid. I wasn't sexually active until I was 18 years old. I had a fairly substantial sexual education. I'll just jump right into it. When I became pregnant, I was 20 years old. It was with my boyfriend of a little less than a year. We were using condoms and I was on birth control, so it was like a complete anomaly. There's a 2% failure rate, and it totally failed.

I want to have children so badly. But I want it to be perfect. I'm a perfectionist. I want to have the resources for my child. I want to be with someone for a long time that also wants to have children. I don't want to be in college when I have a child. It was a very strange experience: feeling like I was protecting myself from what I wanted to be my inevitable future. But not at that time.

My boyfriend and I reasoned through it. It was a very reasonable discussion. We were both in the midst of studies and very serious about staying in school and getting our degrees and moving on to higher degrees and being teachers, and just basically becoming individuals before we took on the responsibility of having a child. We're not together anymore, incidentally.

At the time, I lived and went to school in Radford, VA, which didn't have a Planned Parenthood, so I had to drive 6 hrs. north to Baltimore. It was early enough on that I could have a medical abortion. They did a sonogram and made me feel guilty. I don't know, maybe that was my own Catholic guilt coming back down on me. Oh and I'm not Catholic anymore-- I'm a recovering Catholic, I should mention that too. So they gave me a shot of something and then two days later I was supposed to insert some sort of pill into my body, and then it would basically be like a forced miscarriage. And it happened, and it was painful. I had my best friend there with me, and I had my boyfriend with me.

So it didn't feel as big an event as maybe it should have... but I don't know if there is a "should." I didn't feel like I was killing anything. I was just removing the potential of what had just started to kind of burgeon. And for a lot of people, that's a really cold way to approach it, but I still don't feel like I made an unethical choice. In fact, I think I made the most ethical choice. I don't feel like if I had continued with the pregnancy, that my child would have had the life that I would want for him or her. I don't feel like I'd be contributing to society as a whole.